Drop a cap on that GIF. About this thing.
gifcap is a Windows desktop GIF encoder. no browser, no upload bar, no ads. ffmpeg and gifski do the work; we just wrapped them in a drag-drop UI and a hard size cap.
What gifcap does
You drag an MP4 onto gifcap. It encodes a GIF locally and drops the file next to the source, or in whatever folder you point it at. That's the whole loop. No upload, no queue, no round-trip — the only bottleneck is your CPU.
The engine is ffmpeg plus gifski. ffmpeg decodes and scales the source; gifski encodes the final GIF using per-frame palettes instead of one global palette. That's why gifcap's output holds up on gradient-heavy UI recordings and color-rich game footage where one-shot ffmpeg recipes smear into dithered mush.
The differentiator is the hard size cap. Most encoders hand you a quality slider and leave you to guess. gifcap lets you type a target — 2 MB, 5 MB, 10 MB, whatever — and binary-searches gifski quality until the output lands just under it. Same clip, same cap, same byte count. Useful when you need a GIF to fit a Slack upload, a README budget, or an email attachment limit.
When a quality sweep can't get you under the cap, gifcap falls back to fps and resolution in that order — never silently, never before the search runs. If the clip ultimately can't land under an unreasonable target, the app surfaces the tradeoff in a preview rather than shipping a degraded GIF behind your back.
Who built it
gifcap is built by Alain at Gamut Creative. Solo — dev, brand, and sales all from the same desk. The reason it's Windows-first is that the GIF-tool gap on Windows is real. Mac users have Sindre Sorhus's gifski.app and CleanShot X. Windows users get ScreenToGif (capable but WPF-heavy), ShareX (a utility belt, not a GIF app), LICEcap (frozen in 2012), or the browser.
gifcap fills the empty quadrant: Windows-native, polished, and honest about what's free versus paid. Built by someone who uses it every day — not a committee, not a cloud service, not a freemium funnel.
The stack is PySide6 for the UI, Python for the glue, and the usual pair for the engine: ffmpeg (decode + scale) and gifski (encode). The installer is signed, weighs 18 MB, and runs on Windows 10 and 11. Updates ship from GitHub Releases; the app checks for a new version on launch and defers the decision to you.
How we charge
The free tier is a real free tier. No watermark, no resolution cap, no duration cap, no frame-rate cap. If you need to drag an MP4 in and get a GIF out under a size budget, free covers it. That's 90% of what people use gifcap for.
Pro is $29 lifetime. One-time purchase, no subscription, no expiring license. Pro unlocks two things: scene detection (PySceneDetect splits a long clip into separate scenes you can queue individually) and the gallery (a local library of every GIF you've encoded). Both work offline. Both stay unlocked forever. We don't do dark patterns, trial timers, or "upgrade to remove the X." Free is free. Pro is $29 once. That's the whole pricing page.
How to get in touch
Email Alain at alain@gamutcreative.tv. For installer releases, bug reports, and version history, the repo is at gamutcreative/gifcap_installer. Feature requests land there too — open an issue, or reply to whatever update email brought you here.